Olympia
by BobH2
Summary: Mulder and Scully are called in to investigate when something mysterious happens to a space shuttle orbiter during its return to Earth.
1. Chapter 1

SPACE SHUTTLE OLYMPIA  
>EARTH ORBIT<p>

The light streaming into the shuttle orbiter began to turn orange as it hit the atmosphere, before reaching a deep salmon color, the result of the ionisation of the air running over the surface of the craft at hypersonic speeds. Anyone viewing the rear of the shuttle would also have seen the big shock waves that hit the tail as the air came off the wings and the nose. Having taken this ride before, Mission Commander Nathan Winters smiled. He knew this was actually all normal, with only a slight buzz as they came down from supersonic to subsonic speed. Now that the mission was almost over, he couldn't help reflecting on how it had began, ten days earlier...

It had been only an hour or so after dawn, but the Florida sun was already brutal as it bounced off that vast expanse of bone-white concrete and in through the windows of the vehicle carrying the seven astronauts across to the launch pad. Winters was hardly new to this but the butterflies in his stomach had been no less than on his first mission. Not that he had let it show. As Mission Commander of the Space Shuttle Olympia this time out it had been his job to inspire confidence in his crew and he had personally briefed the newbies on what to expect based on his own experiences. He glanced around him at them now, all in their space suits and securely strapped back in their seats, proud of what they had accomplished.

This was Winters' third shuttle mission, and his first as Mission Commander. His pilot was Qing Yuan Zhang - Colonel, USAF. Just like Winters, only he was now retired from the service. They had known each other almost twenty years, though this was the first time they had been in space together. The five Mission Specialists were husband and wife team Joe and Carole Branson, Jill Reilly, Mark Stoker, and Ray Washington. Winters, Jill Reilly, and the Bransons were all married with children, the others all unmarried and childless. In Qing Yuan's case, this was because she had put career ahead of family, and Mark Stoker was gay, though discreet enough this had never caused any real problems with NASA. Ray Washington was black, quiet, intense, the youngest member of the crew - Winters had never really managed to get a satisfactory 'read' on him.

These were the people Winters had shared his life with for the past ten days. Now they would be going their separate ways. They had had a lot of tasks to get through, but it had been a pretty routine mission, as unremarkable as a shuttle mission ever can be. Beside him now Qing Yuan made some adjustments, keeping the nose high to dissipate any drag, and Winters took a moment to run an appreciative eye over her. Tall for an Asian woman, she still had the same slender figure he'd admired when they first met as young military graduates over twenty years ago. While not as conventionally beautiful as, say, Jill Reilly with her red hair, classic features and fashion model figure, Qing was still an attractive woman and Winters wondered - not for the first time - why she had never married or had any relationship that had lasted more than a few months. Perhaps she had just never found the right man.

Their return to Earth was not a flight so much as a controlled fall, but though quieter and longer than the launch (an hour as against eight minutes) it had the potential to be every bit as dangerous. For a long time these missions had been regarded as entirely routine. That was until January 28, 1986, until Challenger. Winters was musing on this when it happened.

The light coming in through the windows suddenly vanished, blinking out as instantaneously as if a switch had been thrown. In the eerie silence that followed, the total blackness was broken only by the lights from the instrument panels. Then Qing Yuan made her announcement.

"Commander, the Earth...!"

"What about it?"

"It's not there anymore."

As suddenly as it had gone away, the salmon light of reentry returned, streaming in through the windows.

"Planetary status?" asked Winters.

"It..it's back," said Qing Yuan, sounding shaken. "I don't understand what just happened."

"Neither do I. It's like we were cut off from the universe for a few seconds there. I have no idea what that was."

They all had a lot of time to think during the remaining descent, and Winters had no doubt what everyone was thinking about. As soon as it was possible to reestablish radio contact with mission control he did so.

"Come in Mission Control," he said, "this is the Olympia orbiter. We have successfully completed atmospheric reentry."

This was greeted with silence. Winters waited ten seconds and was about to send the message again when the radio crackled into life.

"Uhh...please repeat, orbiter."

"I repeat, this is Colonel Nathan Winters, commander of the space shuttle Olympia. You may have lost us for a few seconds there - we're not sure why - but the orbiter successfully completed atmospheric reentry."

More silence, then the radio crackled into life again.

"Acknowledged, Olympia. We're also puzzled by the loss of contact on this end. We'll debrief you when you land."

"Huh," said Joe Branson, "he was trying to sound calm but I could tell he was freaked out about something."

"It has to be the loss of contact," said Carole Branson. "They were monitoring the descent and must've seen something they don't like, so they're taking precautions."

The orbiter landed on the high desert of Edwards AFB ten seconds later than scheduled according to the onboard chronometers, jolting the crew forward against their restraining harnesses as the rear parachute deployed, rapidly reducing forward momentum. As the craft slowly came to a halt, they loosened their harnesses and removed their helmets.

"I wonder what this place was really like back when it was called Muroc?" said Winters, as a way of breaking the silence. "I suppose we've all read the books about that time, even talked to some of the original Mercury Seven who started out as test pilots there if we're lucky, but nothing can truly recapture those days."

"Always sounded pretty primitive to me," sniffed Jill, "and a macho boy's club, too. I'll take modern conveniences and attitudes over that any time."

As was standard procedure, there would now be a wait on the runway of several hours to allow the orbiter to cool. Soon, a small fleet of vehicles would be racing towards them, teams deploying to the front and rear of the orbiter to test for presence of hydrogen, monomethylhydrazine, hydrazine, nitrogen tetroxide and ammonia, while others would attach purge and vent lines to remove toxic gases from fuel lines and the cargo bay.

Except none of that happened.

"Where are the recovery vehicles?" asked Mark Stoker after a few minutes.

"Good question," said Winters. "Olympia to Mission Control, come in please."

"Olympia, this is Mission Control, please remain calm while we decide how to proceed."

"Explain, please. Is this anything to do with what happened to us during our descent, with the few seconds we seemed to be somewhere else?"

"Affirmative, Olympia. But you weren't gone for a few seconds...you vanished for over six minutes."


	2. Chapter 2

HANGAR 43  
>EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE<br>CALIFORNIA.

Winters removed the syringe from his arm, replaced the needle with a cap, and placed it in the drawer at the front of his isolation capsule. He then pulled down the small shutter. As soon as this locked in place it released the lock on a similar shutter outside the capsule allowing the white-coated medical personnel monitoring him to remove the drawer on their side and retrieve the syringe. This was also how they got food in to him. He had been fed twice in the twelve hours he had so far spent in here.

The capsule was twelve feet long by six wide. It contained a bed, a desk, a chair, the complete works of Shakespeare, Dickens, and Twain, and - behind a half-screen at the rear - a toilet. Winters had to supply blood samples before every meal. He was guessing stools and urine from the toilet were also being collected and tested. Whatever anyone thought might be behind what happened to Olympia, they were taking no chances. Winters understood their caution, agreed with it even, but that didn't mean he wasn't missing his family.

When they were eventually allowed to leave the orbiter, an isolation vehicle had carried him and the others from it to this hangar, where they were each decanted into a separate isolation unit. These were lined up in a row in the center of the hangar, with gaps of several feet between them. With only a single window at the front, this also meant none of them could see the others. Watching the activity through his window, Winters was puzzled by the fact that despite Edwards being a military base he had yet to see a military uniform. Everyone was either wearing white coats over civilian garb or they were dressed in coveralls. Thirty minutes or so before this last blood sample transfer, a table and two chairs had been placed in front of his capsule, a microphone placed on the table, and a cable from the microphone plugged into a jack on the outside of the capsule. This had to mean someone was finally coming to interview him. And about time too. Apart from the medics instructing him on how to take samples, he had not spoken to anyone since being separated from his crew.

A small door within the larger hangar door opened and two people entered. A man and a woman, they were dressed in business suits and long coats. As they got closer Winters could see that they were young, the woman maybe late twenties or early thirties and the man a couple of years older. Both were good-looking, the woman particularly so. A redhead, she was very much his type, the sort of woman he had pursued before he married. The pair seated themselves at the table, put the files they had been carrying down on it, then the woman switched on the microphone.

"Good morning, ah...Colonel Winters," she said, her voice coming in clearly through the speaker mounted above the window, "do you know who we are?"

"No," he replied, shaking his head, "I have no idea."

"So you don't recognize either of us?"

"No, should I?"

They exchanged a glance, then the man wrote something on the pad in front of him.

"I'm Scully, and this is Mulder," said the woman. "We'll be asking you questions about both your life and the mission. Please answer them all fully to the best of your ability."

"Of course."

"What was it like," asked Mulder, "going up in Olympia?"

"The scariest part of any spaceflight occurs just before take-off," he told them, "the tension, the anticipation, starts when you get out of the bus at Kennedy Space Center Pad 39B and stare up at those huge rocket engines, filled with highly explosive fuel. Then you take the elevator up a hundred and fifty feet and walk across the short walkway leading into the shuttle itself. A couple of technicians help strap you in, but when the door seals, you and your crewmates are on your own. There's an hour or so where you're lying on your back, while all over the launch site, technicians are running like hell to get last minute checks done before the final countdown - there's a launch window of only five-to-ten minutes and you dare not miss it. Six seconds before lift-off, the liquid rocket engines ignite and you feel a slight shudder. At zero, you lift off. The noise and vibration are almost indescribable. But it doesn't matter, because you're on your way into the heavens. On your way into outer space."

"And when you got into orbit?" asked Mulder, clearly fascinated.

"The difference between the g-forces pinning you to your seat during the ascent and the gentle pressure of the restraining harness stopping you from drifting out of that same seat after you've achieved orbit could not be greater. Unsurprisingly, the latter is far more pleasant to experience than the former. Not that there's much time to contemplate such things. No sooner did we achieve orbital insertion - at a height of 122 nautical miles and an inclination of 51.6 degrees - than we had to run through a series of systems checks with Mission Control back in Houston. Nevertheless, I still paused as I caught sight of the moon coming into view around the edge of the planet below, and gazed at it wistfully. 'I know what you're thinking,' Qing Yuan said to me, 'How does that quote of Gene Cernan's go again?' 'Yes, I am the last man to have walked on the moon,' I replied, 'and that's a very dubious and disappointing honor. It's been far too long.' And he was right. It has been. I always thought I'd walk on the moon one day, but I guess that's never going to happen now.' 'You never know,' she said to me, 'anything might happen.'"

Mulder jotted down some more notes, then slid the microphone across to Scully, who had slipped on her spectacles and been studying what Winters assumed to be a file on him.

"Was it all work on board, or did you get some downtime?" she asked.

"Of course we did. After the initial tasks had been completed along with the mandatory exercise routines, I got to enjoy my first period of downtime since the launch with Carole Branson. She and I were at the head of the initial meal rotation."

"What was the food like?"

"Meals for astronauts might have improved since the 1960s and the days of food in a toothpaste tube, but they're still nothing to write home about. But at least the break meant we got to talk about something Carole had been wanting to discuss."

"Mission related?"

"No, personal. She told me my son Todd had asked her daughter Donna to their prom. He'd told me he was going to. I don't think I've ever seen him so nervous."

"Donna is the eldest of Joe and Carole Branson's two daughters," said Scully, checking another file.

"That's right, and Todd is the middle of my three sons. We and the Bransons are next door neighbours back in Florida. Carole thought it was sweet, the captain of the school football team being so nervous. Todd's pretty fearless most of the time, too, but he should take a leaf from his older brother's book when it comes to girls. Danny could sweet talk the birds from the trees. Carole asked me if my wife and Mary and I were getting used to the idea we'll soon be grandparents yet, what with Danny's wife Susan about to give birth any day now."

"When's she due?"

"A week, according to her doctor. And we're delighted at the prospect. We'll be the most doting grandparents you've ever seen. Danny and Susan told us the child's gender - mainly so that I would know in advance what colour to paint the nursery. And I have to tell you, I'm really looking forward to holding in my arms the grandson who'll carry my family name into the next generation."

"Interesting. What else did you discuss?"

"I asked her if she was nervous about the EVA schedule for our second day. She admitted she was, but that mostly she was looking forward to it. Joe had been on a spacewalk before, had talked her through it, and assured her it was a blast. Which it is, though actually working on the satellites is hard work. It takes so much longer to perform any task in space than it does back on Earth."

"That was why you were there? Satellite maintenance?"

"There was the usual package of scientific experiments to conduct, but the primary mission goal was the repair and servicing of two communications satellites. We serviced the first in situ on day two, and pulled the other into the shuttle for more extensive work five days later. Can I ask you something, Miss Scully?"

"Go ahead."

"What is it you hope to achieve with these questions? I haven't told you anything you couldn't have learned from my personnel file or the mission logs. Nothing I've said tells you anything about what happened to the Olympia during our descent or how it may have affected us."

"On the contrary. You've told me a great deal, particularly in regards to your family."

"I don't understand."

"You don't have a wife," said Scully, "and your children don't exist, because you never married. "

"""""

HANGAR 44  
>EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE<br>CALIFORNIA.

It was quiet in the main hangar where the Olympia was kept, the teams of technicians who pored over her during the day having all gone home for the night.

"Looks like we have the place all to ourselves," said Mulder.

"Good," said Scully, sliding her arms around his waist. Grinning, he leaned down and they locked lips, kissing passionately until she sank her fingers into his buttocks.

"Owww!" he yelped, breaking their embrace.

"Still sore from last night?" she said, grinning.

"You play rough, lady. I hadn't expected you to claw my ass like you did, and I've got teeth marks in my shoulder."

"Oh, poor baby," she cooed, fishing her lighter and a pack of Marlboros from her coat pocket. Lighting a cigarette, she took a deep drag then blew a long stream of smoke towards the ceiling high above their heads, smiling appreciatively. Returning the lighter to her pocket, she paused and ran her thumb over the words engraved on its gold surface for a few seconds before putting it away.

"What do you think it means?" she said, wandering over to the orbiter and gazing up at it.

"What do I think what means?"

"The flag on the fuselage," she said, "it's got fifty stars on it."

"That's how many states our country has on their Earth, Major Scully," said a new voice. They turned to see their superior striding across the hangar towards them.

"Colonel Skinner!" said Scully, dropping her cigarette to the concrete and hastily twisting it out beneath the toe of her shoe.

"So we're sure they're from a parallel universe," said Mulder, "and not our missing craft and crew somehow transformed?"

"Yes, Captain Mulder, we are. And now that we've made that determination they'll have to be killed, of course. We can't risk cultural contamination, and there could be panic if the public ever learned parallel universes actually exist."

"I understand, sir."

"What about you, Major Scully? Are you ready to perform the autopsies?"

"I've carried out autopsies on aliens," she said, "so a few humans won't be a problem."

"Humans, yes," said Skinner, "but not from our world. In my book that makes them aliens, too."

"If their shuttle and her crew ended up in our universe, I wonder if ours ended up in theirs," said Mulder. "And if so, what would they make of them?"

"I doubt we'll ever know, Captain," said Skinner, "I doubt we'll ever know."


	3. Chapter 3

EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE  
>CALIFORNIA<p>

"Are we there yet?"

"Very funny, Mulder," said Scully, as they pulled up to the gates of the base. She glanced across to her partner, who had been slouching in the passenger seat of their rental car since they had left LAX, then rolled down her window,

"IDs please, ma'am, sir," said the uniformed guard on the gate, leaning in.

They flashed their FBI IDs and the guard nodded to his colleague in the guardhouse, who raised the gate.

"Major Meacham is expecting you," he said. "Please proceed to the reception building."

Such was the vastness of the base, that this was no small drive. The sun had beat down on them from the moment they had landed at LAX, and leaving the outskirts of Los Angeles had also meant leaving greenery behind. From then onward the land had been yellow and parched.

"Edwards Air Force Base," said Mulder, as they sped through the dry, flat landscape inside the fence, "formerly Muroc. Do we know what we're doing here yet?"

"Deputy Director Skinner said we had been requested by name," replied Scully, "and it's apparently a matter of national security. Beyond that, I don't know any more than you do."

Major Meacham was a square-jawed man with a military buzz-cut who looked to be in his early thirties. He greeted them eagerly when they pulled up outside the nondescript reception building.

"Agents Mulder and Scully," he said, shaking their hands, "I'm glad you made it OK. My superiors weren't in favor of bringing civilians in on this, but you're just what we need."

"For what, exactly?" asked Mulder.

"It's the Space Shuttle Olympia," he said. "The crew returned to Earth yesterday and, well, the Mission Commander - Nathan Winters - is refusing to speak to anyone but Agent Scully."

"Me?" said Scully. "But I've never met the man."

"Did you read the personnel files on him and the rest of the crew we faxed across to you?"

"We both went over them in depth on our flight out from DC," said Mulder.

"Good, then if you'll follow me I'll take you to him. Leave your car here; we're taking my jeep."

"I thought shuttle orbiters usually returned to Kennedy Space Center these days," said Mulder as they climbed into the jeep.

"Yes, since 1991. They only land at Edwards now when the weather makes a landing at Kennedy impossible. We're fortunate that was this case with this flight."

The trip to the Hangar 43 was a short one, and the major was waved through by the armed guards on the doors. Inside, he parked the jeep a short distance from an array of isolation chambers. Arranged in a circle, windows facing outwards, they all held a single occupant. In front of each window was a table with two chairs, on top of which was a microphone.

Major Meacham led them over to one of them, holding a middle-aged man wearing a uniform. They didn't recognize the uniform, but they did recognize the man from the photo in his personnel file: Nathan Winters. His face lit up when he caught sight of Scully. The FBI agents seated themselves at the table, Meacham standing behind them. Scully pressed the button on the microphone that opened communications between them and Winters.

"You came!" he said, his face lighting up on seeing her. "I always knew I was more than just another one of the many notches on your bedpost."

Mulder's eyebrows shot up at this.

"Don't say anything, Mulder," warned Scully, not needing to look at her partner to know his reaction to this.

"Do you still have the cigarette lighter I gave you?" asked Winters.

"Cigarette lighter?" said Scully, sounding puzzled. "But I don't smoke."

"You don't? Since when?"

"Since a couple of months during my teenage years. I'm sorry Colonel Winters, but I've never met you before. You must have me confused with someone else."

"No, no, we were lovers," he insisted, "and why does everyone keep calling me 'Colonel Winters'? It's _Captain_ Winters."

"I'm sure this must be frustrating for you, Captain Winters," said Mulder, taking the initiative, "but we'll try to have you back with your wife and children as soon as we can."

"What wife and children?" he shouted, angry now. "I don't have a wife and children! I never married!"

"OK, OK," said Mulder, trying to calm him, "tell me about your mission."

"Mission? You mean the flight? There isn't much to tell. I was just ferrying supplies up to the space station and carrying back scientists who were returning from an assignment on the moon at Clavius Base. But...why are you asking me all these questions? I insisted Dana be the one to interview me because something about this place seemed off. I wondered if maybe we weren't at the real Edwards but at some place in the Soviet Union made to look like it, that the strange event during our reentry was them somehow diverting the orbiter. When I saw Dana I was relieved. I thought it proved I was wrong. But she's not right either. What is going on here?"

Mulder switched the microphone off, and turned to face Meacham.

"We don't have a completed space station yet, we won't have for several years, and we certainly don't have a moonbase. As for the Soviet Union, it shut up shop eight years ago. Like he said, what's going on here?"

"This man is delusional," said Scully, "that much is obvious."

"Yeah," said Mulder. "Did something happen to him while he was in space? Is that why we were called in? Do you suspect an encounter of some sort with extraterrestrials?"

"I think it's best if you follow me," said Meacham, turning on his heel. "There's something in the next hangar you need to see. It will explain everything."

Intrigued, they got to their feet and trailed after him. The contents of the other hangar were not what either expected.

"Wow," said Mulder, when he saw what it contained.

"The crew went up in the Olympia," said Major Meacham, "this is what they came back in."

The craft in the hangar was sleeker than the blocky shuttle, its lines far more elegant.

"It's years ahead of the shuttle," said Meacham, "though the mass of the two is almost identical. We don't know whether or not that's significant."

"How is this even possible?" asked Scully. "How could they have gone up in one craft and returned in another?"

"I'm beginning to suspect 'they' didn't," said Mulder, gazing upwards and still marvelling at the craft. "You want to tell us what happened, major?"

"The descent appeared perfectly normal," he said. "We were tracking it on radar. Only one minute it was there, and the next it wasn't. We thought we'd lost it, but six minutes later it reappeared - in the exact same spot it had disappeared."

"What, no loss of altitude?" said Mulder.

"None. Piloting the orbiter to earth from space has been compared to flying a refrigerator. It's an unpowered, falling object that you steer, but you can't arrest its descent. Yet in that six minute period it was arrested. It's as if the orbiter blinked out of existence for those six minutes. Only what blinked back into existence wasn't the same craft. And so far as its occupants and the onboard chronometers were concerned it was only gone for a few seconds. On the surface those occupants appear to be the same crew we sent up, but only on the surface, as you discovered."

"No, they're not the same people at all, are they?" said Mulder. "They have to be from a parallel universe. Somehow as Olympia was descending over our Earth and they were over theirs, the two craft got switched."

"That's the conclusion our scientists have tentatively reached, too, but... parallel universes? I have to tell you I'm having a hard time accepting it, Agent Mulder. That stuff's only ever been theory, and fodder for Star Trek episodes."

"Not any more," said Mulder, "not any more."

"If you're right then Nathan Winters genuinely is a captain not a major, and he really does know me," said Scully, "at least he knows the me of that other universe. I wonder what she's like?"

"Sexually promiscuous and a smoker," said Mulder.

"Beyond that, I mean. Is she still essentially the same person, or is she radically different from me?"

"How different are the crew of this shuttle from our own?" asked Mulder. "Has anyone who knows their counterparts intimately been brought in to make that evaluation?"

"No, and they won't be," said Meacham. "The only reason you two are here is because Captain Winters refused point black to speak to anyone other than Agent Scully - or Major Dana Scully, as he insisted on calling her. Apparently you two are with military intelligence on his Earth. As per protocol, his crewmates are insisting that only he should speak for them so we pretty much had to call you in on this. Also, your reputation precedes you."

"Really? In what way?"

"The X-files are more widely known about among powerful people than you imagine, Agent Mulder. Regular FBI agents would not have been allowed the access you're being given here."

"Then I guess we'd better get back to extracting whatever we can from Captain Winters..."

""""""""""""

FBI HEADQUARTERS,  
>WASHINGTON DC.<br>THREE DAYS LATER

"Have you seen the news, Scully?" asked Mulder, as she entered their cluttered basement office.

"What news?"

He indicated the TV, where the news anchor was reporting on a plane crash in which everyone had been killed.

"I don't..."

"It was the NASA jet allegedly flying the crew of the Olympia back across country," said Mulder. "The bodies of everyone on board were apparently burned beyond recognition."

"You think they were killed?"

"Maybe, maybe not. I'd like to think the plane was loaded with corpses before it was deliberately crashed and no one was actually killed, but I doubt if we'll ever be told the truth. I should've seen something like this coming. The crew from that parallel Earth may look like our people, but they're not. There's no way they could be allowed out into our world, particularly if there was any chance of them meeting the families of the crew of the Olympia. The absence of that crew needed to be explained, and what better way than by faking their deaths?"

"What about the missing shuttle?"

"I doubt the public will be told it's missing. I'm guessing the official story will be that a post-flight inspection has raised concerns and Olympia is being retired on safety grounds. After Challenger people will accept this, and no one need be any the wiser."

"They'll never know it's lost in another universe. I wonder why the switch happened?"

"Oh it might be really common and people might be swapping universes every day."

"What do you mean?"

"According to the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, we live in a multiverse containing an infinite humber of universes, some of which will be almost indistinguishable from ours. Perhaps we swap universes constantly and don't realise it. It would explain why you can put something down in a room and find it gone when you return a few minutes later. It hasn't moved but you have. You've gone from a universe in which the item is in that room to one where it isn't. You might not now be working with the Fox Mulder you first met, Scully. You might have worked with dozens of different Mulders over the years."

"All of them with the same interest in pornography," said Scully, smiling wryly.

"Hey, some things have to be constant across universes. Seriously though, if that is what happens, switching universes would be a natural phenomenon, and only very rarely would you get a switch where the differences were big enough to attract attention."

"As in the case of those spacecraft?"

"Yes. If I had to hazard a guess I'd say the fact the two craft had the same mass, were carrying the same crew, and were in the exact same location in their two worlds had something to do with why those particular craft swapped places."

"So a natural phenomenon rather than something else?"

"That would be my guess. As for why the craft are so different...The final Apollo mission was Apollo 17 and Gene Cernan was Mission Commander. There's a famous quote attributed to him: 'Yes, I am the last man to have walked on the moon, and that's a very dubious and disappointing honor. It's been far too long.' I'm betting that in their universe Cernan wasn't the last man on the moon, that unlike us they kept going. They set up a permanent moonbase and developed craft like the one we saw at Edwards. I like their space program more than I do ours."

"The visitors' craft is the only remaining proof of the existence of that other Earth."

"Yes, and by now it's almost certainly been moved to a secure location - I'm betting Area 51 - where its secrets can be unlocked and it will never be seen again."

"It seemed so much more advanced than our orbiter. I'm still having trouble believing it was a commercial craft, but their Jill Reilly was some sort of flight attendant and had the uniform to match. Then there's that logo."

"Pan-Am," said Mulder, "a company that ceased to exist in our world in December 1991 - almost eight years ago."

"Do you believe what Winters said about a permanent moon base, and them having excavated an alien artifact?"

"I think we have to, particularly given the report and photos in that secure pouch they were carrying back to Earth. What I want to know is whether we have a similar artifact buried on our own moon."

They had not been allowed to take away the report, of course, but Mulder would never forget the photo showing the artifact. The image of that large, black monolith was seared into his brain.

And it always would be.

""""""""""""

The End.


End file.
